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More About the Director

About the Director

Rajeev Dhawan wears a dual hat as a professor and as director of the Economic Forecasting Center at the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. As director of one of the country’s premier forecasting centers, Dhawan develops forecasts for the U.S., Southeast regional, and local metro Atlanta economies. These forecasts are regularly published and presented to business executives and the media at the center’s popular, well-respected quarterly forecasting conferences.

Dr. Dhawan is a current board member of National Association for Business Economics (NABE), the NABE Financial Roundtable and the NABE Industry Survey. He also serves on the board of Public Broadcasting Atlanta and is a past board member of the Association for University Business and Economic Research. He has been a member of the Georgia Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors since early 2004.

Awards

Dhawan has received several awards for his forecasting accuracy, including most accurate GDP forecast by Bloomberg News in 2005. The Bank One Economic Outlook Center at Arizona State University in 2003 named him the most accurate forecaster for U.S. employment. He has also been listed among Georgia Trend magazine’s “100 Most Influential Georgians” for three consecutive years. Dhawan is known for his ability to articulate complex economic issues in terms that are extremely relevant to the business community. He is frequently called upon to brief the boards of private companies and regularly gives keynote speeches at various industry and trade group events.

International Speaker

A sought-after international speaker, he has presented at conferences in Argentina, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Germany, India, Japan, Netherland, Spain, Sweden and across the U.S. As a consultant, he has been commissioned to prepare economic impact reports, home price forecast models and provide public policy recommendations. Dhawan has served as an advisor to several local and state government agencies and numerous publicly held companies. These companies include Coca-Cola, Georgia Power, Morgan Keegan and Turner Broadcasting, among others. Dhawan has directed impact analysis studies for Amgen, Northrop Grumman, LA Development Corporation, the California Automobile Import Alliance and the California Energy Commission.

Media Appearances

Frequently contacted by the media for his economic analysis and expertise, Dhawan often appears on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, the Bloomberg Report and the Atlanta affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX. He is sought after for many national and regional publications, including The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Investor’s Business Daily, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Atlanta Business Chronicle, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and national wire services including Associated Press, Reuters and the Dow Jones News Service.

Dhawan regularly contributes his U.S. forecast to well-regarded surveys such as Bank One Economic Outlook Survey, Blue Chip Economic Indicators, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Livingston Survey, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Professional Forecaster’s Survey, National Association of Business Economists Outlook Survey, USA Today Forecaster’s Survey and a number of others.

Academic Research

Dhawan’s academic research analyzes U.S. business cycles with a special emphasis on the impact of monetary policy changes on the growth and survival of small firms. His international industry comparison study examined factors that enabled Toyota to dominate not only U.S. companies, but also its Japanese counterparts. His industrial organization work quantifies the contribution of organizational and technological factors in improving firm efficiency. His other areas of specialization include small business strategy and entrepreneurship, energy economics and econometric modeling.

In his recent work, Dhawan has quantified the role and importance of oil prices in U.S. business cycle fluctuations. His research has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals such as Management Science; Journal of Money, Credit and Banking; Review of Economic Dynamics; Economic Inquiry; Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization; Journal of Productivity Analysis; and the International Journal of the Economics of Business. He is also the author of Firm Size, Financial Intermediation and Business Cycles, which explores the effect of liquidity constraints on U.S. economic performance.

Earlier Career

Prior to joining Georgia State University in the fall of 2000, he served as director of Econometric Forecasting at the Business Forecasting Project of the Anderson School of Business at UCLA. In this role, Dhawan authored quarterly forecasts for the U.S. and California economies, directed economic impact studies and taught in the business school. He has also taught economics, logistics and statistics courses at Pepperdine University and California State University at Long Beach.

Dhawan earned a B.A. in Economics, with honors, from St. Stephen’s College in India, a master’s degree in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics at Delhi University in India, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California Los Angeles.